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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 8/23/16

Abbreviated pundit roundup: A campaign of conspiracies

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Here's The St. Louis Post-Dispatch on the matter:

"Pennsylvania Republicans know full well the demographic changes that have turned their state blue in national elections. That's why in 2012 they passed a voter-identification law requiring photo IDs to vote. The only chance to win was to suppress the growing black and Hispanic vote, as Republican state Rep. Mike Turzai inadvertently admitted when he boasted that voter ID 'is gonna allow Gov. (Mitt) Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.'

"Romney lost by five points. In 2014, a state judge threw out the Pennsylvania voter ID law, saying there was no evidence of voter fraud.

"Now comes Trump, who doesn't need evidence to make scurrilous charges and who appears to be summoning the dark forces of paranoia and intolerance to his own ends. His list of horribles grows ever longer."

And a letter to the editor in Pennsylvania's Tribune Review:

"All Pennsylvanians should feel insulted by Donald Trump telling us that if he doesn't win in our state, it is because of cheating. His comment is ironic coming from a man who reportedly cheated on his women, in his golf games and in his dealings with some of the Trump University students.

"Trump is a hypersensitive narcissist who reminds many of a pouting child. I am a registered Republican and a conservative, and I find it impossible to understand how Trump won the nomination.

"Mary Shirey Ross"

Even Richard Cohen chimes in:

"Trump, like a kid playing with matches, can start a conflagration. The GOP has already done considerable damage to the faith Americans once had in their government. It is time for the party to say, 'Enough!' Republicans who have been on the fence about Trump -- party leaders such as the occasionally principled Reince Priebus -- have got to call a halt to this nonsense. Their enduring concern is too narrow. They should worry more about their country and less about their party. [...]

"Trump has identified no one and probably would rather run a media empire than the federal government. But his amorphous charges of cheating, of fraud, of rigged elections threaten to delegitimize not just a Clinton presidency but also a system that not only works, but works well. It is not Clinton or her supporters who are the culprits here, it is cowed Republicans instead. Their silence is the dagger."

Eric Levitz at New York Magazine points out that Trump's preemptive claims of "fraud!" are a natural extension of Republican politics:

"For over a decade, the GOP has attempted to solve its problem with minority voters by enacting electoral reforms that reduce their presence at the polls. To rationalize such anti-democratic reforms, the party invented a crisis of democratic legitimacy. One year after McCain's remarks about ACORN, a Public Policy Polling survey found a majority of Republicans believed the organization had stolen the election for Barack Obama.

"Now, as Trump attempts to rationalize his potential loss by hyping that same fictional crisis, 'principled conservatives' are performing their outrage. The least they could do is perform their shame."

David Graham calls the conspiracies regarding Hillary Clinton's health the "birtherism" of 2016:

"The fact that there's no evidence for serious ailments plaguing Clinton is not an impediment to these conspiracy theories; it's essential to them. In the absence of evidence, campaign surrogates can espouse the theories on television and elsewhere, under the old guise of 'just asking questions.' This is a favorite Trump trick. He doesn't know whether Ted Cruz's father was implicated in the Kennedy assassination, but he saw a story saying that in the National Enquirer and he's just asking some questions. Or, to connect this back to the birther issue, Trump doesn't know that Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States, but there are some fishy things, and he's just asking whether there's any evidence he wasn't. [...]

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